


Three

by Linsky



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Angst, First Time, Happy Ending, Kid Fic, M/M, Not polyamory, Pining, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-02 11:37:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5246873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Linsky/pseuds/Linsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patrick doesn’t think he’s a pervert. But how would he know? Maybe a pervert is just a thing you are, and it doesn’t feel any different from being a normal person, until you do something perverted. Maybe that’s him.</p>
<p>After all, he does have two names on his wrist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Posting for Patrick Kane's [birthday bonanza](http://aohatsu.tumblr.com/post/133384819388/so-patrick-kanes-birthday-is-coming-up-three)! I don't usually post stories before I have at least a rough draft of the whole thing, but I'm making an exception for you, Kaner. Happy birthday.
> 
> Note: Polyamory doesn't come up in the first chapter, but it does later, for, um, obvious reasons (though as the tag says, this story is not actually about polyamory). Patrick's confusion on the topic should not in any way be interpreted to reflect badly on polyamory in general. Sometimes our hockey boys are just a little confused.

Black lettering shows up on Patrick’s wrist when he’s six, right on schedule.

He can’t read what it is at first. It’s too faint, and all the lines aren’t there. Of course, he can’t read very well in general, so on the day the lines are finally all filled in, black and spidery, he goes to his mom.

“Ariadne,” she reads. “That’s lovely, Patrick.”

“That’s not a real name,” says Erica, who’s only five and doesn’t know anything.

“Is so,” Patrick says, because obviously it is. It’s the name of his soulmate. That makes it real.

“Don’t tease your brother,” their mom says, and sends them to play outside.

Patrick knows it’s a real name, he does, but lying in bed that night, he’s not so sure. So he sneaks out of his room and asks his dad about it.

“It’s Greek,” his dad says. “She’s a person in a story from a long time ago.” And he shows Patrick on the computer where there’s a summary of the story of Ariadne, how she fell in love with Theseus and helped him escape the monster in the maze.

So his soulmate is someone who does heroic things. Someone who stands up to monsters. Patrick decides that he’s okay with that.

***

Erica’s name shows up the next year: N-O-A-H, marching nice and neat across her wrist. She and Patrick play a game where the names on their wrists are their own characters, and Noah and Ariadne talk to each other and have adventures. Sometimes Noah gets to be Theseus who’s rescued from the Minotaur, even though it means that afterward Patrick has to play Noah’s ark, which is just stupid in comparison.

Jess and Jackie are super jealous until their names come in a couple of years later. Then they can all play the game together, and it’s awesome.

“Look,” Jackie says one day when she’s six and Patrick’s eleven. “Patrick has two names.”

“Do not,” Patrick says.

“No one has two names,” Erica says. “You’re just saying that because Lionel is so awful.”

“Is not.” Jackie wells up. Recently she’s been crying every time anything doesn’t go her way, and Patrick’s getting pretty sick of it.

“Let’s play Hungry Hungry Hippos,” he says, and that gets them all off the subject.

When he looks at his wrist later, though, he sees what Jackie was talking about: it does look like there’s another name coming in, just underneath Ariadne. There are some faint marks that could almost be black lines. Maybe he’s getting a bruise.

He presses on it while he’s going to sleep that night, and it does hurt a little, though that might just be because he keeps touching it. He forgets about it in the morning, and he doesn’t think about it again until he’s in the shower two days later, and he looks down to see a straight vertical line and a shorter top stroke, like the beginning of an F.

Patrick feels a wave of cold even under the hot water. That’s not a bruise.

He pulls his shirt-sleeves over his hands that day at school. That night, he goes to his mom after his sisters are in bed. "Can you get me a wrist cover?" he asks. "It’s just—hockey," he adds, when she looks at him curiously.

It’s not a very good explanation, but she says, "Of course, honey," and kisses him on the forehead. There’s a wrist protector on his bed when he gets home from school the next day.

Patrick was making up the part about it being for hockey, but there are a lot of guys on his team who wear them. A lot of kids at school, too. It’s one thing being a little kid with a name on your wrist, but it’s a little too public, wearing it out in the open like that when you’re in middle school. So no one questions it.

He pulls the wrist guard down every night, though, and watches the other name form. For a while he thinks that maybe it’s part of Ariadne -- like maybe she has two names, like Sarah Marie at school. Sometimes names don’t finish coming in until you’re in your teens; some people’s don’t even start until they’re ten or twelve. Or maybe it’s the nickname she’s started to go by as she’s gotten older. He’s heard of names that have changed like that, if something drastic happens to your soulmate, even if his parents say those are just rumors.

It finally comes in all the way, though, and it’s obviously in a different handwriting: Eliza, in this little elegant script, like writing on a fancy storefront, underneath Ariadne’s tidy upright roundness.

Patrick doesn’t tell anyone about it.

He does try to look it up. He uses the school computers, so that no one will find his search history at home. He goes to yahoo.com and types in, _what if I have two names on my wrist?_

There are a lot of results. Some of them are just using his words separately, like pictures of two wrists with names next to each other. But one site is a forum with questions about names, and someone’s posted, _brother-in-law has two names what do I tell sister to do_

There are a bunch of responses. Some of them are just short responses like, _weird!_ but some say stuff like, _No way dude that’s fucked_ or _sisters making it up to get attention._ And one guy says, _If your sister knows what’s good for her, she’ll run! dude like that will just fuck around on her. No one has two names unless there a fucking pervert._

Patrick closes out of the browser and pushes the chair back from the desk, shaking.

***

He keeps hearing those words in his head for the next few days: _fucking pervert_ and _will just fuck around on her._ Patrick doesn’t think he’s a pervert. But how would he know? Maybe a pervert is just a thing you are, and it doesn’t feel any different from being a normal person, until you do something perverted. Maybe that’s him.

After all, he does have two names on his wrist.

After that, he keeps an even closer eye on his wrist guard. They’re designed not to move at all, but Patrick isn’t taking any chances. It takes him extra time to shower with the team, because he has to check every few seconds to make sure the soap hasn’t made it slip.

That’s bad enough, but then he’s thirteen and the third name starts to show up beneath the second.

Patrick notices it one morning before a game when he’s getting dressed in his room. He starts breathing so hard that he has to sit down with his head in his hands until he stops being dizzy.

A few days later, he can read the first few letters, and it gets even worse.

J-E-F. There have to be things that can stand for that aren’t...Patrick can’t think of any. But his first name was Ariadne. Maybe this is a weird name, one he’s never heard before.

But the other letters come in, slowly, and soon it couldn’t be anything but what it is. Jeffrey. In block letters, like a boy would write.

Patrick can’t eat dinner the night he first sees it clearly. Does his wrist know? Does it see the way his skin gets hot sometimes when he sees another boy in the locker room? Does it know that sometimes when he touches himself at night, it’s to the image of a dark V of hair trailing down to a jutting cock?

Maybe this is his perversion.

***

Now that he has three names on his wrist, he feels like everyone can see. Even when he’s just walking down the street with sweatshirt sleeves pulled over his hands, he sometimes keeps his other hand on his wrist to make sure the guard is still there. Just in case.

He still wonders, though, if people can tell when they look at him. Can they tell that he doesn’t have one name, like a normal person? Can they tell that one of them is a boy’s?

Sometimes his sisters try to get him to take the wrist guard off. “Come oooon, Patty,” Jackie says, when she’s only eight and still wants to play. “We haven’t done the game in forever.”

“Go play it with your friends,” Patrick says, and their mom tells Jackie that Patrick’s too old for that kind of game and she shouldn’t bother him. She starts to cry, though, and he plays three rounds of checkers with her just to cheer her up.

It’s harder to put off his friends when they ask about it. Some kids wear their wrists openly—more and more, as Patrick gets into high school—but even the kids who don’t, there are usually guesses or rumors about what their names are. And it’s sort of a thing, name-swapping to cement a friendship, a show-me-yours-I’ll-show-you-mine deal.

Patrick is freaked out the first couple of times someone tries to do that with him, and it doesn’t go over well, but after that he learns how to blow it off.

“Nah, I don’t do that,” he says, all casual, and he finds out that if he smiles in just the right way they don’t get offended. If he starts talking about some girl they both think is hot after that, they seem to just think he’s cool.

When he’s fourteen, his friend Kevin’s wrist guard gets broken.

It’s really hard to break the things. They’re stretchy fabric, designed to grip but still let your skin breathe, and you pretty much have to attack them with scissors to get them to tear. But a group of Patrick’s friends is camping in the woods the summer after sophomore year, and Kevin falls into some brambles, these really nasty thick things with jagged branches as well as thorns. They’re all focused on getting Kevin out in one piece, laughing a lot because they were kind of freaked out that he’d died or something, at first, and it’s not until he’s out that one of the guys says, “Shit, dude, your guard.”

They all look down at Kevin’s wrist, where the guard is hanging by a thread. Kevin covers it up, but not before they all get a good look at the name: David.

There’s a silence. The half-dozen of them are all standing there, shifting from foot to foot but also trying not to move. Patrick feels like he’s going to choke, like his throat might actually close up and he’ll fall dead to the forest floor, and then one of the guys says, “Well, you can always buy another one.”

“Yeah,” someone else says, slapping Kevin on the back, and that’s it, they’re all moving again.

It takes Patrick a second to catch up, because he’s trying to remember how to breathe again. The guys just found out that Kevin had a guy’s name on his wrist, and—it was kind of okay. Kevin’s walking with them now, a little red in the face but grinning, grumbling about the way the thorns scraped him, and one of the guys says, “Yeah, gotta keep yourself pretty for _David,_ right?” And when everyone laughs, it isn’t even in a mean way.

Patrick wants to cry a little, mostly from relief. But also frustration, because he knows that if they saw his wrist, they wouldn’t react that way. Kevin only has one name. Patrick’s…Patrick’s don’t make any _sense._

***

He asks his doctor that fall, when he’s at a physical and the doctor asks if he has any questions. Patrick says he doesn’t, at first, but then when the doctor’s about to leave the room, he bursts out with, "Do people ever have more than one name?"

He’s all stiff, waiting for the doctor to call him a freak, but the doctor just turns to him with one of those smiles that adults get when they think that something’s funny but are trying to be nice about it. "Have a crush on someone, do you?"

"Huh?" Patrick says, because he doesn’t see how that has anything to do with his names.

The doctor comes closer and sits in his wheelie chair again. "It’s okay to date someone whose name isn’t on your arm," he said. "You don’t have to hold out for anything serious at your age. It doesn’t mean that person has to turn into your soulmate, or that you’re cheating on your future soulmate by liking someone else."

Patrick’s tongue feels thick. "You think...I’m _hoping_ for a second name to show up?"

"It’s natural to think that the person you have feelings for has to be meant for you," the doctor says. "But you’ve got a lot of time before you meet your soulmate. You don’t have to worry about it now."

He’s looking at Patrick all gentle, and Patrick hates it. Does the doctor think Patrick’s crazy, that he would want another name? Besides, Patrick doesn’t like anyone like that. Not enough to think they’re his soulmate.

***

He does date a little, though, in high school. There’s Lucy Simons, whose hair falls over her forehead in this really pretty way, and Patrick catches her smiling back at him. He makes out with her at a party that weekend. It feels good, and the second time they do it he gets hard in his jeans. When he goes home that night he jerks off to the idea of her putting her hand there, on his cock.

He still jerks off to guys sometimes, too, but he knows better than to act on that. Sure, his friends were cool about Kevin, but those weren’t hockey friends. He knows it’s different in the locker room, and he doesn’t need a reputation.

Hockey is the most important thing, anyway. Patrick gets picked to play for Honeybaked, which is amazing, and maybe it’s hard to hope for other things in his life but it’s easy to hope for hockey.

That spring, he plays against a boy named Jeffrey.

***

It’s not the first time Patrick’s ever met someone named Jeffrey. It’s not that unusual a name, after all. But it’s the first time in a few years, and this Jeffrey…well, he grins at Patrick when he steals the puck away from him, and Patrick’s stomach lurches, and he thinks, _Oh, fuck._

There’s a team party afterwards for the visitors, and Patrick tries not to talk to this Jeffrey kid, but Jeffrey comes and talks to him. They talk for an hour or so, Patrick trying not to stare at Jeffrey’s lips or neck or shoulders, and then when they’re in a room that doesn’t have anyone else in it for the moment, Jeffrey leans in and kisses him.

The feel of Jeffrey’s tongue in his mouth makes Patrick’s dick twitch. He opens to it easily, greedily, and he’s rock hard by the time Jeffrey pulls back.

“I really shouldn’t be doing this,” Jeffrey murmurs, while Patrick’s trying to catch his breath. “My soulmate hates it when I hook up on the road.”

He turns his wrist over to show what Patrick hadn’t even thought to look for: the name written there, Karen, in messy script.

Patrick gapes for a minute, then shoves him away. “What the fuck, dude! You’ve already met her?”

Jeffrey laughs. “What, it’s not like we’re married.”

“Yeah, but you shouldn’t—” Patrick starts and then cuts off, because it’s not like he has a leg to stand on. He has three names on his wrist. Practically proof of what he’s going to do someday.

“Whatever,” Jeffrey says, lip curling at him. “I don’t need this.” And he stalks off, leaving Patrick shaken and rapidly losing his erection.

He doesn’t want to do that to someone: make her sad because he isn’t satisfied with just one person to love. He hopes…he hopes he’ll have a choice about it. That maybe he can be strong enough to do the right thing when the time comes.

***

He loses his virginity when he’s seventeen to a girl named Samantha, and it’s pretty mind-blowing. He can see why people make such a big deal out of the whole sex thing. Fucking into Samantha feels so much better than anything he’s done with his own hand, or even the times girls have pressed their hands to the front of his jeans when they’ve been making out. He comes to the sight of her arching underneath him and breathing hard, gasping out his name.

She snuggles up to him afterward, and it’s nice, but he doesn’t feel a whole lot for her when he leaves that night. He probably shouldn’t, though, he figures. She’s obviously not his soulmate—and even if she were, she’d probably be better off without him, given what his wrist looks like. So it’s better if he keeps on not feeling too much about anyone. Safer for them and him, he figures.

Then he meets Jonathan Toews, and that whole plan gets shot to hell.


	2. Chapter 2

Patrick’s known Jonny for a while, of course. He first played him back when he was like ten, and he remembers noticing his skating and thinking, _wow._ Jonny’s been in and out of his hockey circles ever since then. But Patrick doesn’t spend much time with him until they’re both drafted to the Hawks.

It’s all fine at first. Jonny’s an amazing player, even better than Patrick remembered, and when the two of them are on the ice together, it’s like flying. It’s better than anything Patrick could have hoped for from his first few weeks in the NHL, and it’s pretty clear both of them are going to make the team this year. Jonny’s really intense about everything, making them do extra drills and frowning at Patrick until he gets things right, but he frowns at himself just as much, so Patrick can deal. He likes the feeling of Jonny expecting a lot from him, respecting Patrick enough to be as hard on him as he is on himself.

They end up sitting next to each other at one of the first team dinners after training camp. It’s not unusual—they’re thrown together a lot—but Jonny’s in a particularly good mood: bright, full of happiness, practically glowing. Patrick always likes talking to him, but he can’t look away when Jonny’s like this.

Jonny uses the food on his plate to map out some of the plays that worked especially well for them, hands waving, and Patrick snorts into his mashed potatoes because of what a complete _dork_ this guy is. Jonny keeps grinning at him like he knows what Patrick’s reacting to. His grins fizz in the top of Patrick’s stomach. By the time dinner is over, Patrick’s floating on it, like the way Jonny’s looking at him is some kind of helium balloon lodged inside his torso and making him bright and giddy.

He sticks close to Jonny when they get up from the table, not wanting anyone to get between them. Jonny shoots him a smile, a little shy, when Patrick moves in close to him, and it goes to Patrick’s head like champagne.

They do have to separate to get into cabs, and—Patrick doesn’t want to. It kind of hurts, turning to walk away from Jonny, even though he’ll see him tomorrow. He wants to see him now. He wants to see what more the bubbly feeling in his stomach can become.

Patrick doesn’t sleep all too well that night, and when he shows up for practice the next morning, he bursts into a big smile at the sight of Jonny taking his shoes off in front of his stall.

Sharpy sidles up to him and gets him in a headlock. “Your crush is showing,” he says into Patrick’s ear.

Patrick can feel himself flush. “Don’t have a crush,” he mutters.

“Sure,” Sharpy says, and Patrick panics a little, because he can’t have a crush. He’s not supposed to have a crush on anyone. But Jonny looks up then and spots him, and his face breaks into a smile so sunny that Patrick knows he’s fucked.

***

Patrick’s determined that the crush won’t be a big deal. But then he gets assigned to room with Jonny on the road, and he gets to see him all sleep-rumpled and crabby in the mornings and all hard-eyed and driven when he’s on the ice and all prickly and determined all the time and God help him, Patrick loves all of it.

He tries not to let Jonny see. He thinks he does a pretty good job of it. It’s a good thing that Jonny’s name isn’t on his arm, so at least Patrick knows Jonny isn’t one of the people he’ll probably cheat on someday. But that doesn’t make it any easier not to smile back when Jonny looks at him, or not to think about him at night when Jonny’s a bed away, probably all warm and smooth and—

But Patrick can’t cross the distance. Even if—like Patrick imagines sometimes when Jonny looks at him after a good play, eyes snapping to Patrick’s and crinkling at the corners—Jonny might be interested, too. He probably isn’t, and even if he were, Jonny isn’t a name-freak like Patrick. He has someone else waiting for him, someone with just one name on her wrist.

Patrick wonders what name is on Jonny’s wrist, sometimes. Jonny never takes his wrist guard off; a lot of people don’t, in the NHL. It cuts down on the random girls coming up to you and claiming that their name is the one on your wrist. Anyway, a lot of the guys on the team have already met their soulmate, so it’s a moot point. Those guys are usually a bit more lax about their guards—take them off to shower, sometimes even to play—but most of the single guys are more careful.

Jonny’s one of the careful ones. Patrick wants to ask him what’s under there, sometimes—would love to know if it’s a guy or a girl, even—but that would be pretty hypocritical, since Patrick can’t share his. And besides, there’s no reason for him to care. Jonny’s name isn’t on his wrist, so even if Jonny’s wrist said Patrick, they wouldn’t be matched.

But that doesn’t make it any easier not to imagine Jonny’s body next to his when he jerks off secretly late at night with Jonny sleeping only a few feet away.

***

Patrick’s in his second season with the Hawks when he first hears the word “polyamory.”

Seabs brings it up before practice one day in the locker room. Patrick’s lacing up his skates, not really listening.

“Pretty sure you just mean a threesome,” Duncs says.

“No, it’s a thing,” Seabs says. “There are people who are actually in a relationship with more than one person,” and Patrick freezes.

“What, like more than your soulmate?” Duncs says. “How does that even work?”

Seabs shrugs. “All sorts of ways. Dayna was explaining it to me. Sometimes it’s an open relationship, like where both people date other people, and sometimes it’s more than two people, all in a relationship together.”

Patrick’s barely breathing. Just listening, fingers clenched in his laces.

“Sounds hot,” Sharpy says, his grin audible in his voice.

“I don’t know, man, I don’t think I could do it,” Duncs says. “Sharing your girlfriend with someone else? Nope.”

“Hey, not saying it’s a good idea, just that some people do it,” Seabs says, and then they have to get on the ice, and the subject gets dropped.

Patrick looks it up as soon as he gets home, though. It is a thing. There’s a Wikipedia article and everything. Apparently it’s “the practice, desire, or acceptance of intimate relationships that are not exclusive with respect to other sexual or intimate relationships, with knowledge and consent of everyone involved.”

He spends a while staring at that last part, about knowledge and consent. It never occurred to him before that you could date more than one person and have it be okay. He always figured that was cheating. But if what he’s reading is right, then some people do that with their partner’s permission. Not like she’s letting you cheat, but like…it’s not cheating at all. Like it’s what you both want. Like it’s as good as any other kind of relationship.

He bites his lip and tries to figure out if he feels polyamorous. He’s not sure what it would feel like, though. The thought of three people in bed together does get him hot, but then, the thought of two chicks together does too, and he’s pretty sure he’s not a lesbian.

Instead he tries to imagine Ariadne and Eliza and Jeffrey and him all living together, a family with four adults. That doesn’t seem too bad. It would be almost like team. Or like his family’s house when all of his sisters are around and the house is full of people and noise. He thinks he’d like that.

It’s hard to imagine the love part, though, when these aren’t real people he has feelings about. He thinks about Jonny instead, tries to imagine being with Jonny and—and someone else, anyone, and Jonny being in love with that person, too. He gets an immediate flare of _no. No,_ he wouldn’t want to share Jonny like that.

But maybe that’s why Jonny isn’t one of the names on his arm. Because he’d never be able to share Jonny like that. Maybe…maybe with his people, it will be different.

It has to be, right? Because otherwise he’ll never be able to be with anyone at all.

***

Hockey players don’t usually let the public know their names, but some of them do look for their soulmates, sometimes using the discrete soulmate match services that offer handwriting comparisons so you can tell if the name on someone’s wrist is really yours or just a coincidence. Patrick’s mom starts sending him links in his second year in the league, like now it’s time to settle down.

Patrick doesn’t want to settle down. The thought of it fills him with panic. Maybe if he knew it would just be one person, that he’d have the kind of relationship he sees his teammates having. But the idea of a real relationship with multiple people in it—he needs more time to get used to that.

Besides, he’s not even sure a soulmate site would let him submit three names. He’d probably have to create fake user accounts. And then what if he met one of them, and they saw his names and freaked out? The sites Patrick’s been reading about polyamory mostly just talk about having names on separate wrists, or how it’s okay to be with multiple people when you only have one name, so Patrick’s not even sure this is a normal thing in polyamory.

He does try to date, though, or at least hook up. All the single guys on the team do, and Patrick doesn’t want to be weird. He mostly sticks to girls—the whole guy thing is still questionable in the NHL, even if there are couple of guys who have male names on their wrists, and besides, the guy thing makes him think of things, and people, that he can’t have.

But then there’s the time in March of his second season when he’s dancing with this one girl and she leans up and whispers in his ear that she has a boyfriend.

“Oh, sorry,” he says, and tries to back away, but she grabs his arm.

“No,” she says into his ear, leaning close so that her boobs are pressed against his chest, “he wants to watch.”

Patrick sucks in a breath. Okay, he can get on board with this.

The girl’s boyfriend is pretty cute, and he gives Patrick this embarrassed smile when they’re introduced. It’s kind of awkward, but Patrick figures this is good practice—he needs to learn how to roll with this stuff, if apparently it’s going to be his life. So he lets Annie and Mark take him back to their apartment and take his coat.

“So, um,” Patrick says, fighting not to stick his hands in his pockets. “How do you want this to go?”

Annie exchanges a grin with Mark over Patrick’s shoulder. “I want you to fuck me on the bed,” she says, and yeah, Patrick can do that.

He’s already hard, and Annie is really wet when he fingers her, so he doesn’t take too much time getting her ready. He’s a little nervous but definitely turned on. He rolls a condom over himself, feels Mark’s eyes on him, and—imagines that it’s Jonny.

He doesn’t mean to; the image just comes to him, and then he can’t shake it. His eyes sink closed as he pushes into Annie’s warm wetness. Jonny, sitting a few feet away, watching him do this. His dark eyes trained on Patrick’s every move. Maybe it would be getting him hard—the sight of Patrick’s cock sinking into Annie’s pussy—maybe he would start touching himself. Running his hand over his hard-on through his jeans.

Patrick starts thrusting harder. He’s imagining Jonny’s mouth falling open in arousal, breaths coming in pants, maybe Jonny’s eyes rolling back. But then looking forward again, because he has to watch Patrick. Except maybe—then Patrick would stop fucking the girl, get up, go over to Jonny, sink down on his knees, wrap his mouth around—

Annie gives a cry of—pleasure? pain?—and Patrick’s eyes snap open. Okay, it was probably pleasure. She has her fingers on her clit, touching herself while Patrick fucks into her. But he needs to stay in the moment, needs to pay attention to the person he’s actually fucking. Can’t think about Jonny naked under his hands. Jonny’s hard cock sinking into his throat.

Mark gives a groan from where he’s watching and it hits Patrick like a punch to the gut, imagining Jonny sounding like that. He’s heard him, sometimes, jerking off late at night when he thought Patrick was asleep, and the thought of Jonny making that sound for him, because he was watching him—

Patrick fucks in harder and comes, shaking as he spills into the condom.

Annie hasn’t come yet, he realizes as soon as he’s caught his breath. She still has her fingers on her clit, being patient, but he feels guilty.

“Let me take care of that for you,” he says, and he drops down to lick at her clit.

“Oh fuck,” Mark says, all breathy, and just like that, it’s Jonny again. Patrick licks at Annie and she mewls above him and his head swims with the image of Jonny watching him do this. Maybe he’d be okay with the whole polyamory thing, if it were mostly about Jonny—

Annie comes around his tongue, and Patrick rocks back, feeling shaky and still a little turned on. Okay, so he can do this. It’s hot, having more than two people in the room for sex. He’s not fooling himself that this is all polyamory is, but at least he can do this part. It’s just—it’s hard to think about it, hard even to know if he wants it, when all he can think about is how much he wants _Jonny._

Fuck. It’s a good thing he hasn’t met any of the people on his wrist yet, because he’s obviously not ready. He’s going to have to get over Jonny first.

***

He doesn’t do that great a job of it that year, even with the whole summer apart. When they come back that fall, he still can’t take his eyes off Jonny’s face when he says hello. Still wants to stand too close and gets jealous if anyone else tries to sit next to him at meals.

“Ugh, get your own food,” Jonny says when Patrick follows him home for lunch after practice, but he lets Patrick in and orders enough Chinese for both of them. Then refuses to let Patrick leave until Jonny’s beat him at least three times at NHL 10.

Patrick’s awesome at NHL 10, so that takes a while.

***

That June they win the Cup. It’s the most amazing thing Patrick’s ever been a part of. He takes a lap around the ice with the Cup held high, and when Jonny slams into him and wraps him in his arms, Patrick wants to kiss him so badly he’s choking on it.

In the aftermath, there are lots of parties and lots of alcohol and lots of girls throwing themselves at him. Patrick’s planning to go home with some of them. But instead he ends up sticking close to Jonny, because Jonny’s always magnetic, but like this— _happy_ —his presence is like a drug. Patrick leans against his side and drinks in his smiles and his bright snapping eyes and feels himself getting high off it.

It’s a good thing Jonny doesn’t pick up much during those weeks. Patrick tries to pull back from time to time, give Jonny the space he’d need to get some of the ass being handed to them, but the whole pulling back thing? Patrick’s really bad at it. And it would hurt, anyway, seeing Jonny leave Patrick’s side to go off with someone else and give her the things Patrick really, really wants.

But Jonny doesn’t seem to hook up at all following the Cup—not that he normally does much, anyway.

That’s just one of the things that makes it weird when he shows up in Chicago two months later with a baby.


	3. Chapter 3

Sharpy’s the one who texts Patrick about it first. _dude you have to come back here and see this,_ the text says.

_im sure your hair looks great but you have a wife for that now,_ Patrick texts back.

_no seriously,_ Sharpy texts, and then, _get back here right now._ And then there’s a third text, which is just a picture of Jonny holding a baby.

Patrick’s on the next plane out.

Sharpy’s the one who opens the door to Jonny’s condo, beaming and looking smug.

“What, do you live here now?” Patrick asks.

“Wait till you see,” Sharpy says, stepping aside to let Patrick in.

The apartment is a mess. Patrick’s spent a lot of time here over the past three years, and Jonny’s kind of a slob, sure, but it’s never looked like this. Like…a baby supply store threw up on it. And maybe a couple of babies, to judge by the crud on the carpet.

“What the fuck have you guys been doing in here?” Patrick asks.

Sharpy waves his hand. “This is nothing. You should have seen it before he cleaned it up this morning.”

Patrick casts an eye at a pile of dirty clothes on the carpet. He’s maybe about to say something else disparaging, but that’s when Jonny walks through the doorway.

“Hey, Sharpy, I can’t find her bottle, can you—holy _shit.”_

Jonny freezes in the doorway, staring at Patrick. He’s just as much of a mess as his apartment: hair sticking up in clumps, a dirty towel over his shoulder, mismatched socks on. Oh, and the baby in his arms.

“What are you doing here?” Jonny asks.

“Sharpy called me.” Patrick would glare at Sharpy, who obviously didn’t tell Jonny he was spreading the word, but he can’t look away from the baby. She’s gorgeous, and really tiny, like so tiny he can’t believe she’s out in the world already. She has a few little tufts of hair and wide brown eyes that are carefully studying the air in front of her.

Patrick wants to ask to hold her. He doesn’t even know where that impulse came from. But he wants it.

“Well, uh, come in, I guess,” Jonny says. He looks really exhausted, so Patrick figures he’ll overlook what a crappy welcome that is. Besides, there’s a gorgeous baby in his arms.

“What’s her name?” he asks.

“Ariadne,” Jonny says, and Patrick stops breathing.

***

It’s a good thing Sharpy’s there, because Jonny’s still looking for the baby bottle, and Patrick is currently incapable of moving. Sharpy’s the one who ferries them into the kitchen and finds the baby bottle on top of the microwave and gets Patrick to sit down with a glass of water.

Patrick’s not sure Jonny’s noticed he’s being weird yet. Jonny’s too focused on warming the formula and on getting Ariadne to stop fussing, because she’s started making these little cries.

“Why, uh,” Patrick manages to choke out when Ariadne has her bottle and Jonny’s finally sitting down at the kitchen table. “Why Ariadne?”

Jonny blushes. His face is tilted down towards Ariadne, so it’s not totally obvious, but Patrick’s looking straight at him, and he definitely blushes. “I just always thought it was pretty.”

“Hey, don’t spare him the Greek mythology explanation,” Sharpy says. “I had to hear that thing three times last night.”

Patrick knows all about the story of Ariadne. He actually has a couple of books on it. But he looks at Jonny anyway.

“She was a princess who saved Theseus from the Minotaur,” Jonny says. He’s still talking to Ariadne’s head, but now less like he’s embarrassed and more like he’s ridiculously fond. “I guess I liked that she was a princess who did the saving. Like maybe she’ll grow up to be really brave, you know?”

“Dork,” Sharpy says, grinning at Patrick and inviting him to join in the joke at Jonny’s newly revealed layer of dorkiness. But Patrick’s too busy stumbling over the name.

Ariadne. There’s no way Jonny could know. Patrick’s never taken his wrist guard off around anyone. Though if—maybe his parents, or his sisters—

No, they would never do that. His sisters do have a weird level of affection for Jonny that Patrick tries not to get giddy about under normal circumstances, but they would never tell him Patrick’s name. Not when they know how private Patrick is about it.

So it has to be a coincidence. Patrick knows the name does get used, every once in a while. It’s just really rare. Like, not even ranked in the U.S. rare. He’s never met anyone with the name before. Elizas, Jeffreys, sure…but not Ariadne.

“Can I hold her?” he asks, and Jonny looks up, startled.

“Um, sure,” he says, and gets up to transfer Ariadne and her bottle to Patrick’s arms.

Patrick’s held babies before in his life. He’s never been really sure where the appeal lies, to be honest, but he always figured that when it was his baby, it would be different—if he got to have a baby, that is; if his weird soulmate situation worked itself out.

Ariadne, though. She settles into his arms, all soft and milk-hungry, and Patrick _loves_ her. He wants to hold this baby forever. Wants to walk out the door with her and never come back.

She has these tiny little eyelids. Her eyes look so big when they’re open, but then when they’re shut her eyelashes look like the tiniest things ever created. And her mouth, little itsy-bitsy lips working around the top of the bottle. And her hands—she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, and it’s—

“Hey, how come you don’t freak out when _he_ wants to hold her this long?” Sharpy asks. “I come over here, I change her diapers, and I barely get five seconds of baby-holding time. Where’s the love, Jonny?”

“You almost dropped her changing her diaper,” Jonny says.

“Slander,” Sharpy says. “Blatant lies.”

Patrick doesn’t even look up. He just keeps his hand on Ariadne’s head, stroking over the tiny wisps of hair as she sucks on the bottle.

***

“Hey,” Sharpy says, poking a finger into Patrick’s side after Jonny’s left to put Ariadne down for a nap. “Peeks. Stay with me.”

“Huh?” Patrick looks at him.

Sharpy’s grinning his shark-grin, teeth bright. “Man, if I’d known this was the reaction it would get, I would have gotten Jonny a baby years ago.”

Patrick gapes at him. “You mean you—”

“Of course not.” Sharpy makes a face. “Don’t be an idiot.”

“But then how…” Patrick starts to ask, and stops when Jonny shows up in the doorway.

Jonny has a spit-up cloth draped over his shoulder, and his eyes are half-lidded. “She’s asleep,” he whispers, like maybe she can hear them.

“Right,” Patrick says. He shouldn’t ask. He really shouldn’t ask, because he’s not sure he wants to know the answer, but—”So, where did you get her?”

“Oh good,” Sharpy says gleefully. “I was hoping this would come up.”

Jonny’s got the beginning of his murder eyes on. “Did he put you up to this?” he asks Patrick.

“What?” Patrick says, staring back at Jonny’s glare. “No! I just want to know. Duh,” he adds.

Sharpy tips his chair backward. “I may have been a tad persistent on the subject last night,” he says to Patrick.

“Huh? Why?” Patrick asks.

“Because I’m not telling anyone anything,” Jonny says, and then, to Sharpy, “No, don’t even start, Kaner does count as someone, and so do you.”

Patrick raises an eyebrow. “You’re not telling anyone—what?”

Jonny shrugs, clearly uncomfortable. “The…mom…doesn’t want anyone to know who she is, okay? She doesn’t want the chance that it’ll get out to the press. And I know you’re not going to tell the press,” he says quickly, forestalling Patrick’s protest, “but this is what she wanted.”

Sharpy leans forward so that his chair legs hit the ground again. “Tell the truth. Is it a secret marriage, Toes?” he asks, smile growing on his lips. “Because if so, you know you can tell us anyth—”

“No, Jesus!” Jonny makes a disgusted face. “She’s just some girl I slept with back in October, okay? That’s all.”

There’s no reason that should bother Patrick. He’d already assumed, you know, sex, baby, and he knew Jonny picked up sometimes. But his stomach still drops a little at hearing Jonny say it. The idea of some woman sleeping with Jonny and _having his baby,_ fuck.

Sharpy catches Patrick’s eye and mouths _secret marriage._ Patrick tries to grin back.

“Look,” Jonny says, voice going into that grate-y zone. “We slept together, the condom broke or whatever, and now there’s a baby. That’s it. End of story.”

If that is the end of the story, Patrick feels like he could be okay with it. Not that he should be having problems with it in the first place. “She…didn’t want to be involved?” he asks.

“No. But I do,” Jonny says, belligerent, like maybe Patrick is going to challenge him on it, try to talk him out of it.

Patrick wouldn’t dream of it.

***

Sharpy confiscates the baby monitor and sends Jonny off to take a nap. Then he, in turn, conks out on the sofa while he and Patrick are supposed to be cleaning up the living room. Patrick sticks his tongue out at him for it, but hey, Sharpy’s been here for a while, helping with baby stuff. He probably needs the sleep.

It means that Patrick’s the only one awake when Ariadne starts crying over the monitor.

It’s just soft cries, like she’s starting to wake up, but he doesn’t want her to get loud while Jonny and Sharpy are sleeping. He picks up the monitor and tiptoes to her room.

Last time he was in here, it was a guest room, but it’s been totally transformed. It’s got the works, all done in green and yellow: changing table, rocking chair, crib. But Patrick can barely look at any of it for the baby.

She’s just so beautiful. Even if Jonny hadn’t just gotten through telling them the story, Patrick feels like he would know Jonny was the father: she’s got Jonny’s big wide brown eyes, his high forehead. She’s waving a hand in the air and making these soft little cooing sounds.

“Look at you, what a good baby, not crying at all,” Patrick says. He reaches under and lifts her out carefully, the fabric of her onesie scrunching up a little. She tilts her face up at him.

God. Ariadne.

He hopes his soulmate is half as beautiful as this.

He goes and sits in the rocking chair with her against his chest, and somehow, miraculously, Ariadne seems fine with this. Other babies he’s met over the years have cried a _lot,_ so maybe he’s just caught her at the perfect moment.

“Or maybe you’re just the best baby, yeah? Maybe that’s it,” he says, and strokes a finger down her cheek, while she blinks her little baby eyes at him.

When he looks up a moment later, Jonny’s in the doorway, watching them.

Patrick feels immediately guilty, even though he knows he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He feels like he needs to put Ariadne back in the crib and pretend he didn’t touch her.

Jonny’s looking at him with kind of this weird expression, though. Like Patrick caught him in the middle of a sentence, even though he hadn’t been saying anything.

“Sorry,” Patrick says. “Sorry, she was making noise, and I didn’t want…”

“It’s okay,” Jonny says, voice kind of soft. “I can take her, though, if you …”

“I don’t mind,” Patrick says, and Jonny crosses the room and kneels down by the rocking chair. He puts a finger to Ariadne’s cheek, where Patrick was touching her before, and then lets her grip his finger with one of her waving fists.

Jonny’s so close. He smells like baby powder and soap. Patrick always feels it when they’re close like this, the catch in his chest, but now Jonny’s looking at this baby with eyes full of love and Patrick can’t. He can’t breathe.

“She’s so perfect,” Jonny says in a whisper, and Patrick wants to say all sorts of stupid things.

Jonny leans in to kiss her forehead, and Patrick feels the flutter of it in his gut and thinks, God, he’s so fucked.

***

Erica calls him when he’s on the way back to his apartment that night. “A baby? Seriously?” she says by way of greeting.

Patrick stops walking. “How—how do you even know about that?”

“Sharpy texted me a picture,” she says, and yeah, Patrick should have guessed.

“How does he have your number?” Patrick asks suspiciously. “He’s not trying anything, is he?”

“Don’t change the subject,” she says. “A baby?”

“It’s Jonny’s,” he says.

She groans. “Wow, okay, all I’m going to say is that I hope there’s another parent involved, or that kid is screwed.”

“Hey, Jonny is perfectly responsible,” Patrick says. “They don’t call him Captain Serious for nothing.”

“Please. That shit might work on other people, but I happen to know one or two hockey players. The only thing you people are serious about is the game.”

“Whatever,” Patrick says, because, okay, yeah, Erica was around when he still couldn’t do laundry at eighteen. But: “Jonny’s going to take good care of her, though. And, I mean, this kid, Erica. She’s amazing.”

“Yeah?” she says, sounding more interested, and, score, Patrick should have remembered earlier how easy it is to get any of his sisters to coo over a baby. “How old is she?”

“Just a few weeks, I think,” Patrick says, though he didn’t ask. She looks small, anyway. “You should see her. She’s all tiny and huge-eyed, with, like little wisps of hair.”

“Aw. What’s her name?” Erica asks, and Patrick’s mind goes blank.

Shit. He should have expected this question. But there’s no point in lying, when Erica would find out soon enough anyway, and he’s already been silent for too long. “Ariadne,” he admits.

Now it’s Erica’s turn to be silent. Then she starts laughing.

“Hey, it’s not funny,” he says.

“No, it is,” she says through her giggles. “You’re—you’re _Jacob!”_

“What the fuck?” he asks, even though he should have seen this one coming. “It’s not—it’s not _Twilight,_ assface, I’m not falling in love with some _baby—”_

“You’ve imprinted,” she says. “It’s your werewolf heritage. You just can’t help it…”

He waits out her giggles for a minute. “It’s not the same Ariadne,” he says. “Obviously.”

“No, I know,” she says, gasping a little as she pulls herself together. “I mean, you’d better hope not. Jonny would straight-up murder you.”

“Skate blade through the heart,” Patrick says, and he tries to tell himself there’s not a twinge of worry under his words. But—

One thing they’ve always been told about the soulmate thing is that it’s inevitable. Not inevitable that you’ll be happy together, but if nothing else, that you’ll be in love. Your soulmate is just too well-suited to you for you not to fall. Usually that goes with happiness, but sometimes circumstances or whatever end up messing it up.

Patrick thinks a twenty-one-year age difference and a murderous father-in-law would be some pretty bad circumstances.

“Does that actually happen?” he asks. “People having soulmates who are like twenty years younger?”

Erica hmms. “I think maybe? But I was just joking. I don’t really think you’re soulmates with your best friend’s kid.”

Patrick hopes not. Because even if she grew up to be the most awesome person conceivable, he can’t imagine not wanting her father more, and that—that’s just fucked up.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the week-long wait; this chapter was a bear to edit, for some reason!

Patrick decides not to worry about it. It’s not like he’s going to fall in love with a baby. And even if someone did find out—well, Jonny would probably be pretty weirded out, but it’s not like anyone could prove that they’re the same Ariadne.

Yeah, Jonny would totally buy that one.

It’s crazy how much Patrick wants to be back there. He just left, like, an hour ago, but he keeps flashing on the moment when he was in the rocking chair, Ariadne in his arms and Jonny right there, and fuck, being alone in his apartment is driving him crazy.

He falls asleep eventually and wakes up at seven the next morning. He makes himself wait an hour because seven isn’t a reasonable time to visit anyone, but then he figures, hey, babies don’t sleep late, so he throws on some clothes and heads to Jonny’s.

Abby’s holding Ariadne when he comes in. Ariadne’s red-faced and whimpering, sounding like she’s coming down from a long cry, and she’s not the kind of baby anyone should want to hold right now, but God help him, Patrick’s jealous. Jealous that Abby was here when Patrick wasn’t, that she’s making herself more at home in Jonny’s apartment than he is.

“Hey, Abs,” Patrick says, because she’s actually a decent, helpful person for doing this and doesn’t deserve his misplaced jealousy. “Congrats again.”

She beams at him, a slightly more tired version of the smile he saw a lot on the altar a few weeks ago. “Thanks. Wasn’t expecting to have a baby to take care of quite so soon, but…”

Patrick’s fingers are itching. “Want me to take her?”

“Could you?” Abby practically thrusts Ariadne at him. “I’ve been here all night, and I could really use a shower.”

“Go home,” Patrick says. “I’ll spell you.”

She looks a little dubious at that—which, please, Patrick should probably be offended by that—but evidently the fatigue wins, and she is out of there.

Then it’s just Patrick and Ariadne in the hallway. He bounces her gently a couple of times, and she looks up at him with peaceful eyes.

He loves this. He’s not sure if he never knew that he loved babies, or if there really is something freaky going on—but _Twilight_ isn’t real, he reminds himself; he can’t _imprint._ He just…wants to hold Jonny’s baby.

“Should we go find your daddy?” he whispers to her.

They find him in his bedroom, sacked out on the bed. He’s on his stomach, mouth open and drooling a little bit on the pillow. He looks dead to the world.

Maybe it’s Patrick’s bad night of sleep talking, but he would love nothing more than to lie down on the bed next to him. Let Ariadne sleep on his chest, scooch over until his leg is touching Jonny’s. Fall asleep.

Who is he kidding—it’s not the night of bad sleep talking.

***

There’s no real reason for Patrick to stay in Chicago at this point. He’d planned to spend August in Buffalo, training and hanging out with his family. But there’s also no real reason to leave: he doesn’t have anything scheduled in Buffalo that he can’t move, and it’s easy to just…not book his flight back.

There’s no reason he can’t train _and_ help Jonny take care of his baby.

Jonny calls him on it, the second day Patrick shows up at his condo. “So, you sticking around?” he asks.

“I guess so.” Patrick shrugs, trying to sound casual. Trying not to sound panicked. “If—if that’s okay?”

“Only if you do the laundry,” Jonny says, and dumps a pile of dirty baby stuff in Patrick’s arms that’s almost enough to make him regret his decision. Almost.

After that, it’s kind of nice, even if Patrick does end up sleeping on the couch more than once and is generally covered in various baby fluids. Sharpy and Abby are around a lot, and Sharpy drags Patrick and Jonny out to train when they’ve gotten too distracted by the baby thing.

“I know why Jonny’s being bad about training, but what’s your excuse?” he asks Patrick, and Patrick’s too busy running on the treadmill to do more than give him the finger. But he would totally have had an awesome comeback otherwise, obviously.

A lot of the time, though, it’s just Patrick and Jonny and Ariadne. And Patrick tries not to love that as much as he does.

“Sometimes I forget how fucking bossy you are,” he says when Jonny tries to show him the right temperature to heat baby formula to.

Jonny smacks his arm. “Don’t swear in front of the baby.”

“She can’t understand me yet.” Patrick’s pretty confident about that, because he read it off the back of a baby book on Jonny’s coffee table.

“Still.” Jonny holds a hand out like he wants to steal the bottle from Patrick. “Do you remember what temperature to heat it to?”

“’Course,” Patrick says, and fortunately Jonny’s always been able to tell when he’s lying.

It’s just—so easy to get used to. Jonny being around all the time. Patrick never felt like he was around enough, before, and he tried not to make himself annoying by going over to Jonny’s all the time, but he always wanted to. Now he has an excuse to be there all day, every day.

Plus, Jonny now comes with bonus Ariadne.

Not that that’s always a good thing. Yeah, she might be the best baby on the planet, but she’s still a baby, and Thursday night she cries so long and hard that he gets maybe half an hour’s worth of sleep.

“You could have woken me up,” Jonny says the next morning, when Patrick’s trying to get her to calm down long enough to let him change her diaper.

“Surprised Ariadne didn’t do that on her own,” Patrick says shortly.

Jonny hunches his shoulders next to him. “You took the baby monitor.”

“I know.” He’s trying to undo Ariadne’s onesie, and it would be easier if she would stay still for two seconds in a row.

“If you wanted me to wake up, you could have—”

“I said it was fine, okay?” Patrick finally gets a grip on the snaps and rips them open. Ariadne’s diaper is half falling off her, because he was half asleep when he put it on her, fuck.

Jonny tries to get his hands in there. “Here, let me—”

“No, I’ve got it.” Patrick wrestles Ariadne’s legs down, and the diaper comes all the way off as she starts wailing again. “Shit fuck _damn,”_ he says.

“Don’t talk like that around her,” Jonny says.

“She’s a fucking baby, she can’t understand,” Patrick says, and he needs to wipe her off but she won’t stop _squirming_.

“Will you just let me do it,” Jonny says, and this time he shoves Patrick away.

Patrick falls back and tells himself that he shouldn’t yell at Jonny just because he’s being the biggest asshole on the planet. But then Jonny starts putting on the new diaper and— “You’re doing it wrong.”

“I am not doing it wrong,” Jonny says.

Patrick’s fingernails cut crescents into his palms. “No, you have to put on baby powder first, or else—”

“For fuck’s sake, Patrick, give it a rest!” Jonny barks out. “I know you’re trying to be, like, World’s Best Dad or whatever, but she is _not your baby,_ okay?”

Patrick freezes, halfway in the act of reaching out. His mouth falls open.

That’s when Ariadne projectile vomits all over them both.

It’s an astonishing amount of vomit. It hits them in a blast, way more than Patrick would ever have thought could come from someone so small. “Fuck. _Fuck,”_ Jonny says.

Patrick’s covered in vomit and still frozen. “Was that…is she…”

Jonny puts his hand on her forehead. “Shit. She’s burning up.”

“Oh God.” Patrick wants to turn around and run out of the apartment. “I didn’t notice, Jonny, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s not your fault.” Jonny’s voice is steadier, and his eyes when he turns to Patrick are steely calm with just a slight overlay of panic. Last-two-minutes-of-a-playoff-game eyes. “Can you—go change and come back here. I’ll get her out of this.”

Patrick stumbles away. He has some clothes here, but Jonny’s room is closer, so he goes and strips off his vomit-covered clothes and pulls on a t-shirt and sweatpants. It would be a ridiculous outfit for leaving the house in under other circumstances, but he can’t think about that right now. Not when Ariadne’s—

When he comes back, she’s in a clean onesie, and Jonny hands her to him.

“Can you get her in the car seat? I’m going to change,” Jonny says.

Patrick doesn’t feel like he should be allowed to hold her. She’s hot in his arms, face working a little like she’s in pain.

“Sh, it’s okay,” he says, trying not to let the hysteria come through in his voice. “We’re going to get you help.”

He gets her strapped into the portable car seat by the time Jonny comes back out, relatively vomit-free. “Come on,” he says. “I called the doctor, but we need to hurry for them to see us.”

Patrick wants to ask if he should be coming—if he should back off and stop whatever stupid fucking pretending he’s been letting himself do. But Jonny’s striding forward, expecting Patrick to carry the car seat, and so Patrick follows.

They’re both quiet and tense on the ride to the doctor’s office. Patrick hasn’t been here before; Jonny must have taken Ariadne to get checked out when he first got her, though, because he strides right in like he knows where he’s going.

“Little bit of a fever, huh?” the nurse asks brightly, and Patrick can see a muscle in Jonny’s jaw go tense.

If Jonny punched her, Patrick’s not sure he’d object.

She gives them paperwork to fill out. Ariadne doesn’t like being in the car seat, so Patrick takes her out and holds her while Jonny does the paperwork. When they’re called, he tries to hand her to Jonny, but Jonny just puts a hand to the small of Patrick’s back and pushes him ahead of him into the doctor’s office.

The corridor is full of medical people and equipment. Patrick tightens his arms around Ariadne.

***

The doctor takes fucking forever to examine her, but then he tells them she’ll be fine. At least, that’s what he says the first few times. Then Jonny asks enough follow-up questions that he practically has to regurgitate an entire medical encyclopedia at them.

“I think what he’s saying is that she’s going to be fine,” Patrick finally says, interrupting Jonny grilling the doctor about the possible complications that can come with ear infections and strep throat. Which Ariadne doesn’t even have.

“You’ll want to keep her hydrated and check her temperature every half-hour,” the doctor says. Maybe it’s Patrick’s imagination, but he sounds relieved. “If it goes above 101.5 or she continues to vomit, give us a call.”

“Right,” Jonny says tensely. Patrick has no doubt they’re already on speed-dial.

The doctor finally leaves after giving them some info about baby Tylenol. It’s a quiet trip home, Ariadne not fussing too much, and she actually goes to sleep when they get back.

Patrick watches as her face smoothes out. His gut is still tied up from everything that happened today, but at least, at least—

Jonny comes to stand at his elbow. Patrick is going to have to say it sooner or later.

It takes a couple of minutes for him to work up the nerve. Then, “Sorry,” he says.

Jonny startles a little. “Sorry? For what?”

“For not noticing that your kid was sick,” Patrick says. “And for. Um.”

“No, I—” Jonny starts to say, then seems to remember where they are. “We should,” he whispers, and jerks his head toward the door.

They go into the living room. Jonny sits on the couch, and Patrick hovers for a moment before sitting next to him.

“I wasn’t right,” Jonny says.

“No, you were. She’s—not my kid,” Patrick says. He feels the words curdling in his belly.

“But you’re so good with her,” Jonny says. “Today, I was so glad to have you here. I probably would have panicked without you.”

Patrick snorts. “You would not.”

“Well…no,” Jonny says, grimacing, because no matter what else, he’s generally honest. “But it would have been harder.”

Patrick stretches out his legs on the couch a little, halfway toward Jonny but not touching him. “Okay, but I’ve been…around, a lot. I know that might be weird. I can stop, if you want.”

“No,” Jonny says, and there aren’t a lot of tones that would make Patrick believe him, but he hits one of them. He meets Patrick’s eyes, and he looks sort of—open. If Patrick didn’t know better, he’d say he looked needy. Patrick bites his lip.

“Okay,” he says, and kicks his foot at Jonny’s thigh. “Douche.”

Jonny catches his foot in a vice grip and then—doesn’t let go of it, lowers it to rest on the couch. “If her first word is an f-bomb, I’m blaming you.”

“Language of champions, baby,” Patrick says, and tries to ignore the way Jonny’s hand is still resting on his foot, thumb stroking slowly along the curve of his arch.

***

Jessica calls the next day. “Coming to visit, bro,” she says.

“Wait, what?” he says, sitting up straight in front of the pile of laundry he’s been trying to fold for the last fifteen minutes.

“Don’t sound too excited or anything,” she says drily.

“No, sorry, I just—did we talk about this?” It’s possible they did. Patrick hasn’t been getting much sleep lately.

“It’s called a surprise,” she says. “Heard of them?”

“What?” he says dumbly.

She gives a gusty sigh. “You said we were going to hang out this August and then you skipped town, so Mom and Dad said I could fly to see you. Down for it?”

“Um, yeah, of course,” he says, and sure, he would usually be thrilled for one of his sisters to stay. But—“I’m kind of—staying at Jonny’s right now,” he says.

There’s a short silence on the other end of the line. “Oh my God, Erica told me, but I totally didn’t believe her,” Jess says, and he can hear her grin.

“It’s not about—” Patrick starts to say, then stops, because there is literally nothing he can end that with that won’t be incriminating. Especially if Jonny’s listening from the other room. “I’m just helping a teammate out, okay?”

“Sure,” she drawls, and he’s not even sure which thing she’s insinuating, but he blushes.

“You can come visit,” Patrick says. “We just might be at Jonny’s a lot, okay?”

“No problem,” she says, like she’d about to start laughing at him any second, and he hangs up, really unsure what he’s gotten himself into.

***

What he’s gotten himself into, apparently, is a visit from both Jessica _and_ Erica. “You said you’d be busy a lot, so I figured she needed the company,” Erica explains when he goes to get them from the airport.

Patrick doesn’t believe that for an instant. If there’s one thing Erica loves, it’s watching Patrick do something ridiculous and/or stupid. And he can’t even deny that’s what he’s doing right now. “So selfless,” he says, tightening his hands on the steering wheel.

It’s been like four hours since he last saw Ariadne. He had to spend some time in his apartment to make sure it was habitable for his sisters before they got here, and now—it just feels like a really long time, all right, and she’s not sick anymore, but she’s still kind of needier than usual, and he should be there to hold her. He should be there to watch Jonny hold her.

“So when do we get to meet this baby?” Jess asks.

“Want to?” Patrick asks, and it’s literally the easiest thing in the world to drive to Jonny’s place instead of his.

Jonny, fortunately, really likes showing off his baby. He practically glows with pride when Erica and Jess coo over her and argue about whose turn it is to hold her.

Not that he’s not vigilant. “Hey—” both Patrick and Jonny shout at the same moment when Jessica’s taking her from Erica, and it looks like her hand is going to slip off Ariadne’s head.

“I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” Jess says. “Geez.”

“Parents,” Erica says, and the word curls in Patrick’s stomach. He doesn’t look at Jonny.

***

Erica and Jess turn out to be pretty helpful. They make dinner that night, and then next day they watch Ariadne while Patrick and Jonny work out.

“You guys really didn’t have to do that,” Patrick says when they get back.

“I know,” Erica says. “That’s why we’re leaving to go shopping now.”

Patrick should really go with them. But Jonny’s holding Ariadne, and he’s cooing at her, and he’s all sweaty and gross from the workout and she’s all gross from spitting up all over her bib, and Patrick just _does not want to leave._

He hands them a credit card instead. “Don’t strain anything,” he says.

Erica gives him a knowing look as they leave. He probably shouldn’t let Jessica spend so much time with her; she’s a bad influence.

***

The girls come back with takeout at five. Jonny and Patrick fall on it ravenously, while Jess holds the baby and Erica shows them what they bought.

“That had better not be the entire contents of Victoria’s Secret,” Patrick says, gesturing at another bag.

“Please,” Erica says. “We shop at better stores than that when it’s your credit card.”

“I am writing you out of my will,” he tells them.

They hang out and even manage to play a board game after dinner. Jonny makes grumpy faces when he sees them getting out Monopoly, but ten minutes in he’s so into it that Patrick starts fearing for his life.

“It was a six,” Jonny says.

“It was a five, and you know it,” Patrick says, ducking the card that Jonny throws at him.

“Atlantic Avenue, cool, I’m keeping it,” Jess says, catching the card, and Jonny rounds on her.

“Um, didn’t you guys have a baby before?” Erica asks, and Jonny looks around wide-eyed for a moment before spotting Ariadne in the swing where they left her. Erica’s poker face lasts for about two seconds before she cracks up, and then she has enough hotels flying at her to build an entire city.

Ariadne starts crying a little while later, and sometimes she’ll stop after a while if you pick her up, but not tonight, apparently. Tonight she really wants to keep crying. She’s usually in bed by eight, but by nine-fifteen she’s not showing any signs of going down.

Patrick sees Jessica yawn and wince while Jonny parades up and down, bouncing Ariadne and trying to get her to quiet. He should take his sisters home, but—

“You guys should head out,” he says instead. “I want to make sure she gets down okay.” He feels like crap for not going with them, especially after ditching them this afternoon, but he just—can’t leave yet. Can’t leave Jonny alone in this.

“Have a blast,” Erica says tiredly, and they troop out with Patrick’s car keys.

“She just _won’t stop,”_ Jonny says half an hour later, and he sounds about one inch away from total breakdown. His eyes are doing that buggy thing.

“Give her to me,” Patrick says. She starts screaming next to his ear while Jonny flees the room, probably to scream into a pillow or something.

There’s probably something in the cry of a screaming baby specifically designed to drive adults insane. Patrick can practically feel his brain leaking out of his ears.

Ariadne does this thing, sometimes, where she falls asleep better on one of their chests than in her crib. Patrick tries it now, leaning against a couch cushion and balancing Ariadne on his chest. It doesn’t do anything to stop her crying, but he’s tired by now, and he’d rather sit down and listen to her scream than stand up and do it.

“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” he says, and evidently there is a god, or at least some kind of limit to her energy supply, because after about twenty minutes of that her cries turn into whimpers and starts snuffling into his chest.

Patrick can feel his muscles unknotting themselves. Silence has never sounded so good.

“That’s my best baby,” he whispers, and strokes his hand up and down her back.

Jonny shows up about two minutes later, when her eyes are drifting closed. “Did she actually stop?”

“No thanks to you,” Patrick says, but he’s grinning. No one’s screaming at him anymore, and there’s a sleeping baby on his chest.

Jonny looks immediately defensive. “Sorry. I just couldn’t—”

“Hey, dude, it’s okay,” Patrick says. Then, because he feels daring: “That’s what I’m here for.”

Jonny sits down next to him. He puts a gentle hand on Ariadne’s back and looks at her with soft eyes.

This—Patrick could live in this moment. Wrap it around himself and never leave.

“I guess I’ll have to decide what to do about her soon,” Jonny says, and Patrick’s arms tighten around her automatically. But Jonny says quickly, “No—not like that. Just—what to tell the press, and all that. Get someone to take care of her while I’m on the road.”

“Oh, right,” Patrick says, but it’s still an unpleasant reminder. They’re living on borrowed time. Pretty soon the season will start, and then Patrick won’t be able to spend all day here with Jonny and Ariadne. Pretending that he belongs here.

Right now, though—the way Jonny’s looking at Ariadne. It’s almost more than Patrick can take.

“You know, I never thought I could have this,” Jonny says.

“Hm? A baby?”

“Yeah.” Jonny smoothes a finger down her hair-wisps. His cheeks have gone a little pink. “I just—I wanted it, someday, but I—didn’t think it was for me.”

Patrick kind of wants to ask why, but he wouldn’t be able to answer for himself, so he doesn’t. “Me either,” he says instead. And then, when Jonny looks at him in surprise, “I mean—not that I do now—”

“You do, though,” Jonny says in a quiet voice.

Patrick’s breath catches. It’s embarrassingly audible. Jonny’s looking at him now, dark and serious, and it’s making Patrick’s insides lurch around and rearrange themselves.

“Do I?” Patrick asks.

Jonny opens his mouth, as if he’s about to speak, and his tongue darts out to wet his lips.

Oh fuck. Patrick feels like his chest is cracking open, under where Ariadne is lying. He just—he wants, he wants so much, and maybe, he thinks, maybe—

Maybe it would be okay if he let himself have this. Close the distance and press his mouth to Jonny’s. Forget about the names on his wrist. He can feel the possibility like a sweet taste in his mouth, curling over his tongue. They could just be—this thing the three of them are.

Maybe Jonny would never even ask what’s behind Patrick’s wrist guard.

Patrick lets his eyes drop. He lowers his face to press against Ariadne’s hair. Tries to breathe out the crazy tension in his gut. Tries to remember the reasons this can’t work.

Jonny doesn’t say anything. Patrick wants to know what his face is doing, but he doesn’t want to look. Does Jonny feel the same desperation that’s churning in Patrick’s gut? Or is Patrick going crazy alone?

“I guess we should put her to bed,” Jonny says finally. He doesn’t get up, though; just shifts to sit further on the couch, flush against Patrick’s side.

Patrick can feel the heat of Jonny’s thigh and shoulder against his. “Yeah,” he says, but he doesn’t get up, either. He just tips his head to lean against Jonny’s shoulder. Jonny rests his head against Patrick’s, ear against the top of Patrick’s hair, and rests a hand on Ariadne’s back.

This: the three of them, in a little bubble of nighttime. Patrick can let himself have this, for now.


	5. Chapter 5

Patrick wakes up a couple of hours later, head still on Jonny’s shoulder and back aching from sleeping in a strange position.

“Shit,” he whispers, and Jonny stirs beside him. He watches Jonny’s face go from confused to angry—at himself, probably, for failing in his eternal discipline and going to sleep on the couch.

“We’d better get her to bed,” Patrick says, and stands, grimacing, with the still-sleeping Ariadne on his chest.

She whimpers a little as he transitions her to the crib, but she settles down pretty quickly. Soon she’s sleeping with her head to the side and a little hand half-open near her mouth.

“She should have crying fits more often, if this is how well she sleeps after,” Patrick says when he rejoins Jonny at her bedroom door.

“Fuck no,” Jonny says darkly, and Patrick snorts and leans against the doorframe. Jesus Christ, he’s tired.

“I guess it’s off to the couch for me,” he says, because no way is he bothering with a cab right now, even with his sisters back at his apartment.

Jonny frowns, and for a second Patrick thinks he’s going to send him home. But all Jonny says is, “You’re gonna fuck up your back. Come share the bed.”

“But—”

“The season starts in a few weeks,” Jonny says, and he has the crazy eyes, so Patrick doesn’t bother arguing. Just follows Jonny into his bedroom, tips onto the bed, and is asleep within minutes.

***

Patrick wakes up feeling well-rested for the first time in days.

He reaches for his phone, his clock, something, before he realizes he’s not in his bed. He’s in Jonny’s bed, with Jonny stretched out a few inches away. Jonny’s breathing slowly, but Patrick’s roomed with him for years, and he can tell when he’s not really asleep.

“Time is it?” he mumbles.

Sure enough, Jonny moves his head against the pillow. “Dunno. Eight.”

“Shit,” Patrick says. “Ari—”

He starts to get up, but Jonny grabs his wrist. “Fed her an hour ago,” he says, eyes still shut.

Patrick falls back against the mattress. He expects Jonny to let go of his wrist, but he doesn’t: he keeps his hand there, fingers light, thumb moving just slightly against the tracery of veins.

It sends a tingle all over Patrick’s skin. Patrick feels something growing in the pit of his belly with the tiny movements of Jonny’s thumb, a slow build of tension. It’s fine; this is just—it’s fine, he’s fine, he’s not going to say anything. He’s just going to lie here and feel this feather touch and hear Jonny breathing next to his ear and—

_”Jonny.”_

It comes out in this desperate voice that Patrick hadn’t meant to use at all. Jonny’s eyes open. They’re sleep-soft, blinking slowly, and looking straight at him over eight inches of pillow.

“Hi,” Jonny says softly, and oh fuck, oh _fuck,_ Patrick’s going to do something really stupid, like kiss him. He can feel it in each brush of Jonny’s thumb against his skin. The space between them feels like nothing, like something Patrick could cross so easily, and he’s forgotten all the reasons he shouldn’t.

“Um,” Patrick says, and he can taste the kiss on the air when he opens his mouth.

Ariadne screams.

It feels like being woken out of deep sleep: the jolt, the disorientation, the way Patrick feels a little sick as they both lurch upwards and scramble for the door. They don’t really both have to go, but—it’s time to get up anyway, and going to Ariadne feels easier than trying to figure anything else that just happened.

Ariadne needs her diaper changed. Jonny does it, and Patrick slumps against the wall of the nursery near the table to watch. Jonny coos at her and strokes the hair back from her face while he does it, and it’s a sad statement on Patrick’s life that hearing, “Who’s the sweetest little baby? Yeah, you’re the sweetest little baby,” can make someone sound more attractive, not less.

“I think she’ll be able to hold her head up soon,” Jonny says as he picks her up after changing her.

Patrick snorts. “I think that’s, like, six months.”

Jonny looks insulted, like the idea of any baby of his doing things on a normal schedule is offensive. “She’s working on it, though.” Then, “Do you want to hold her while I get her food?”

It’s a normal thing for them, passing Ariadne back and forth, but Jonny’s kind of—looking at him, and for some reason Patrick’s heart is in his throat. He takes Ariadne out of Jonny’s arms without saying anything.

He rocks her slowly in his arms. He should go back to his apartment soon. His sisters will be waking up, and he should go hang out with them. Just—not yet.

“I’m thinking about calling her Ari,” Jonny says. He’s back with the bottle, leaning against the doorframe.

“Yeah?” Patrick says. He takes the bottle, and Ariadne starts sucking on it greedily.

“It’s a better length, don’t you think?” Jonny says.

He sounds like he’s really asking for Patrick’s approval. Like maybe if Patrick said no to the nickname, he wouldn’t use it. And Patrick—he doesn’t have any rights here, not really, but he likes that Jonny lets him feel like he does. Has to look down to hide how much he likes it.

He likes the name, too. Anything that’ll make it less likely that this baby’s name is the one on his wrist. “Sounds good to me,” he says softly, and he brushes his lips against her forehead where her hair is a dark-brown fuzz against her skin.

They watch in silence as she finishes her bottle. Then Jonny moves behind Patrick, slow but sort of deliberate, and then—and then—

His hands are sliding around Patrick’s waist. Gentle, almost tentative, until they meet on Patrick’s stomach, and then Patrick is in his arms. Jonny’s chin comes to rest on Patrick’s shoulder, his breath a warm tickle on the side of Patrick’s neck.

Patrick closes his eyes and leans back. Jonny takes more of his weight. Jonny’s chest is solid and warm, and Ariadne—Ari—is a soft little bundle of cloth and baby smell in his arms. Patrick breathes in slow, deep, and knows that he has never been anywhere that feels better than this. Not on the ice, not holding up the Stanley Cup, nowhere.

Jonny tightens his arms around him. He moves his nose to rest against Patrick’s neck. It’s silent except for the rhythm of their breaths and the thump of Patrick’s pulse in his ears.

“I should go,” he says softly.

For a moment, Jonny just presses his nose harder against Patrick’s skin, takes in a long slow breath that Patrick can feel in his chest. Then, “Okay,” he says.

***

Patrick gets out of Jonny’s apartment before his hands start shaking.

He’s never been so glad they live walking distance from each other, because right now he needs to walk: needs to breathe in fresh air and try to steady himself before he has to talk to anyone. Before he even has to look at anyone who isn’t a stranger in the street.

He keeps taking these big breaths, like maybe they’ll clear his head. Like maybe they’ll wipe away the last twenty minutes, or the ten before that when he lay in bed next to Jonny and shivered at the touch of his thumb. Felt his breath on his face.

What if—what if he had stayed and just—

He stops walking and punches the side of a mailbox so suddenly that an old woman with a poodle crashes into him.

She curses him out. Patrick barely hears it.

His sisters are just waking up when he gets back to his place. He’s glad for their morning sleepiness, because it means another few minutes that he gets to pull himself together.

Not like they aren’t going to notice something’s up, though. “So are we heading over to see the squirt?” Erica asks when they’ve gotten some coffee in them and are working on breakfast.

“Actually, I figured just the three of us would hang out today,” Patrick says, and both of them stop eating to look at him. “What?” he asks.

“It just seems…kind of out of character,” Jess says. There’s a suspicious quirk to her lips.

“What, I can’t want a day off?” he says.

“You wouldn’t even leave her last night when she was crying like the spawn of hell. For an hour and a half,” Erica says.

Which…is a fair point. “Hey, if you don’t want to go to the zoo…” he says.

“No, no, we do,” Jess says. “We’re just trying to make sure you haven’t been replaced by a pod person.”

“Pretty sure that happened a few weeks ago,” Erica says, and Patrick pretends he can’t hear them snicker.

***

They go to the zoo, and Patrick’s terrible company all day. He knows it, but he can’t change it. He just…can’t shake the feeling from this morning. The one from last night. The one where Jonny was looking at him, like Patrick was the best thing he’d ever seen, like all he wanted was for Patrick to step a little closer and he’d look at him like that for the rest of his life.

Patrick’s always known he doesn’t get to have that from Jonny. He could pretend, maybe, for a while, with another person whose name isn’t on his arm. But not with Jonny.

Helping with Ariadne was such a mistake. He should have known it would make him want like this. He can’t quite bring himself to regret it—not when it’s Ariadne—but he wishes he could. Wishes he could make the side-effects different.

The zoo was also a mistake, it turns out. Everywhere Patrick looks, there are people walking hand-in-hand, holding babies and cooing over animals. It’s sickening. Patrick glares at one couple for so long that Jess has to nudge him and tell him he’s been hanging out with Tazer for too long, and to quit with the crazy eyes.

Sharpy calls him when they’re in the monkey house and Erica and Jess are looking at the orangutans. “Going to work out, want me to swing by to get you guys?” he asks.

“Oh, um,” Patrick mumbles. “I’m actually. Not there right now.”

He realizes as soon as he says it that way that it’s a mistake. He could have played it way more casually. As it is, he can practically hear the gleeful grin in Sharpy’s voice. “Hang on. You mean you’re not up to your elbows in dirty diapers? You?”

“Hey, my sisters are in town,” he says, and that’s not any better: it’s defensive, and he feels all off-kilter.

“And here I thought it would take a nuclear apocalypse to strip you from that baby’s side,” Sharpy says. “Oh, did I say the baby’s side? I meant—”

“Fuck you,” Patrick says, a little too loudly. Erica gives him a weird look, but he waves her off.

Sharpy starts to laugh. “Oh, come on, Peeks,” he says, but Patrick’s had enough of this. He hangs up and takes his sisters to get ice cream.

There’s a family one table over with a tiny baby in blue who keeps batting its hand at its mother’s cone. Patrick lets most of his ice cream melt.

***

As soon as they get back to his apartment, Patrick goes into his room. He tries to shut the door behind him, but Erica follows him in.

“So, you want to tell me what the fuck is going on with you?” she asks.

Patrick is so not up for this right now. “What do you mean?” he asks, which is stupid, because none of his sisters have ever been put off by his feigning ignorance

Erica collapses on his bed. “Well, to start with, you’ve been pissy as hell all day, and you keep touching your wrist guard.”

Patrick snatches his hand away from the guard. He hadn’t realized he was doing that. “I’m just…kind of tired,” he says, sitting down on the other side of the bed.

She nods. “’Cause you’ve been spending all your time at Jonny’s. Helping to take care of his baby.”

His baby. Patrick’s lips press together. “Right.”

“The baby whose name is on your wrist,” Erica says, and she doesn’t look like she’s joking at all now.

It makes something sharp go through Patrick’s chest, and he sighs. “It’s not like that,” he says, even though he doesn’t know it isn’t. But this isn’t about the weirdness of Ariadne’s name on his wrist. This weirdness is all him and Jonny. Or maybe just all him. He doesn’t even know anymore.

“But…there is something going on,” Erica says.

Patrick hesitates for a second, then makes a little noncommittal head movement. Enough so that she’ll know what he’s saying, but not so much that he has to admit to himself that he said it.

“You want to talk about it?” she asks.

“Not even a little bit,” he says.

She slouches against the pillows. “I hate it when Jess is right. She told me not to come in here.”

Patrick snorts. “Well, she is the smarter one.”

“Only compared to you.” She shoves him with her foot and stretches. “Well, if you’re not going to give me any gossip, want to go to dinner?”

“You guys go, okay?” he says. “I think I’m going to hang out here for a while.”

“Fine,” she says. “But don’t come crying to me when we don’t bring you any leftovers.”

He makes a face at her as she leaves.

After she’s gone, he lies flat on the bed. He just wants…not to feel like this. He’s spent the whole morning and afternoon trying not to think about it, and it’s only been getting worse: the stupid fucking pull in his chest to be back there. To sit next to Jonny on the couch and hold the bottle for Ari and watch Jonny’s stupid face screw up as he tries to get the diaper tabs on right.

He wants to be there right now. Should be there right now. What if Ari needs something and Jonny can’t figure out what it is? What if…

No. Jonny’s good with her. She’s his daughter, after all. Not Patrick’s. No matter how it feels when he holds her, and Jonny’s arms wrap around him.

He curls up on the bed when he hears the front door shut behind them. It’s the kind of position he would be embarrassed to have his sisters to find him in, but there’s no one to watch him right now. No one to notice if he wants to be stupid and look at his names again.

He used to do this all the time. He made himself stop a few years back, though: it got too depressing, realizing he was hoping for them to change. He does better now if he doesn’t think about them too hard, doesn’t spend too much time wondering what they’ll mean for him. But he does it now: pulls the guard up and off, exposing the freakishly pale skin underneath.

These are the names he’s had since he was a kid. The ones that are screwing him over so badly now. He traces his fingers over them and wishes he could erase them: the blocky lines of Jeffrey, the neat script of Eliza, the…

“What the fuck,” he says. He scrambles up to a sitting position.

He looks at Ariadne, except—it’s not quite Ariadne anymore. The last four letters have faded, gone pale and thin, and it’s just the first three that are strong now.

Just those first three letters. Just Ari.

“What the _fuck,”_ he says again.

“Um,” someone says, and Patrick turns to see Jonny standing in the doorway.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who cheerled this! It's been a blast to write. Hope you all have enjoyed it as much as I have!

Patrick scrambles up and tucks his wrist against his chest as fast as humanly possible. He’s a pro athlete, so that’s pretty fast, but he doesn’t know how long Jonny’s been there, and he probably—

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he croaks.

Jonny’s eyes are trained on his wrist, where it’s pressed against his chest. “Your sisters let me in,” he says. He sounds dazed, and he’s breathing a little fast. “Sharpy said…is that, do you have…”

“Fuck.” Patrick backs away. “Fuck, Jonny, I’m sorry.”

Jonny’s eyes fly up to his. “For what?”

“For…” He’s still not sure what Jonny’s seen. But Jonny’s seen something, he’s sure about that; the way he’s staring at Patrick’s wrist doesn’t leave room for doubt. “I know my names aren’t—”

“Patrick.” Jonny comes toward him, eyes dark and focused. Patrick would back away more, but he’s already at the wall, so he just stares up at Jonny as he comes to stand in front of him. He seems really tall, suddenly.

Jonny holds out his hand. “Can I see?”

Patrick could say no. But there’s no way they can go back to normal after this, with Jonny having seen—however much he saw. Even if all he knows is that Patrick has multiple names, that’s enough to change everything. Jonny will never look at him the same way again.

Patrick squeezes his eyes, holds his wrist out. “Sorry,” he says again, and waits for Jonny to freak out.

There’s a pause. Then: “Patrick,” Jonny says. He sounds shocked, like he doesn’t have any air left. “Patrick. Really?”

“I know,” Patrick mumbles. He wants to melt into the wall behind him. He almost wishes Jonny would leave while his eyes are still shut, so he doesn’t have to stand here, braced for whatever will happen next.

What happens next is that soft fingers touch his wrist. 

Patrick’s eyes pop open in surprise. Jonny is holding his wrist, cradling it in the palm of his hand, and looking at it like…

Like he looks at Ariadne.

That—that doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like Patrick thinks Jonny’s an intolerant jerk or anything, but he still shouldn’t be looking at the names on Patrick’s wrist like he’s _happy_ about them.

Maybe he doesn’t get it. But the “Ari” is right there, the other letters faded but visible. Jonny’s finger are brushing over it.

“Are you not,” Patrick starts to say, clears his throat. “I mean, are you…okay? With this?” He didn’t think there was any way Jonny could be, but…

“Patrick,” Jonny says again, and he just sounds _so happy_. His eyes are shining with it. Patrick doesn’t understand at _all._ “You don’t get it, you—”

“Get what?” Patrick says, because no, he doesn’t. Can’t even begin to imagine what Jonny would look happy about right now.

“Just look,” Jonny says. He drops Patrick’s wrist, and that seems about right; Patrick’s been waiting for that. But then Jonny holds out his own wrist, the one with the wrist guard, and pulls _off_ the wrist guard, and—

“Holy shit,” Patrick says. He takes a step back and hits the wall. He blinks and looks again, in case he’s actually gone crazy and has started hallucinating things.

He’s still not sure he hasn’t, because there, on the underside of Jonny’s wrist, are three names.

Ariadne.

Eliza.

And Jeffrey.

“Holy shit. _Jonny,”_ Patrick says. “What the—”

Jonny leans in and seizes his mouth in a kiss. It’s a hard, hungry kiss, and Patrick opens to it automatically. Jonny’s mouth on his is so much—hot and wet and urgent and—Patrick’s panting, shoving his tongue into Jonny’s mouth, then pulling back again just as fast, because—

“What the fuck,” he says, gasping for breath, tasting Jonny on his lips. “Jonny, what—”

Jonny slides a hand up the side of Patrick’s neck, bringing their foreheads together. “It’s us,” he whispers. “Don’t you see? It’s us, it’s them, it’s—it’s what we’re going to have.”

Patrick shivers at the words and the feel of Jonny’s breath on his lips. He can’t possibly mean what Patrick thinks he means. “But,” he says, and Jonny’s fingers trail down to find his wrist again, run over the names there. The three names. The names that never made any sense, not really.

“It’s our family,” Jonny says, and then his lips ease over Patrick’s again.

This time the kiss opens slowly, and it feels like so much more. Jonny’s lips are coaxing his apart, and Patrick has time to meet him halfway, time to wish he’d go faster, to want more of Jonny’s tongue in his mouth.

The gentleness is nothing like Patrick imagined when he lay in the darkness of their shared hotel rooms and heard Jonny jerking off and ached to have Jonny rutting against him. But this touch, Jonny’s soft mouth against his own, floods through him like nothing else ever has: the feeling of _warm_ and _home_ and _safe_. The feeling of this morning, when Jonny wrapped him up in his arms in a little cushion of quiet.

Jonny’s hand slides through Patrick’s curls to cradle the base of his skull and changes the angle of their mouths. It makes the slide of their tongues better, and Patrick gives up on any thoughts that aren’t _yes_ or _good_. Can’t think of anything else when Jonny’s hands are on his body and his tongue is stroking over Patrick’s.

Jonny’s arms tighten around him, and that—that’s amazing. It feels like he’s gathering all the broken pieces of Patrick together: the pieces that broke off when Patrick first saw the three names show up on his wrist, the ones he’s been trying to hold together for so many years. Jonny holds them so effortlessly. Patrick feels something within him shift and relax.

He gets his nose and lips up under the hinge of Jonny’s jaw and tastes, finding the little spots that make Jonny gasp and jerk in his arms. It’s hard to focus, with the way Jonny’s tongue is tracing the rim of his ear, but it’s okay, because they’ll have time—and that thought is so shocking, so new, that it tumbles him over the edge into desperate arousal, makes him buck his hips against Jonny’s to get the friction he needs.

Jonny groans and brings his hands down to Patrick’s ass, pulling him up to grind their hips together. Patrick quivers at the feeling of Jonny’s cock branding his stomach.

He breaks off the kiss to pant. “Jonny—”

“Yeah,” Jonny whispers, and shoves Patrick’s shirt up and off.

He gets his own off next, and it’s so good, their bare chests against each other. Patrick runs his hands hungrily over Jonny’s back, his sides, his hips. Strong muscle, like he knew it would be, but so much hotter and more alive under his hands than in any of his fantasies. Jonny makes a little broken sound when Patrick’s hands skim the bare skin of his stomach, so Patrick keeps going, brushing over the hard little nubs of his nipples.

Jonny breaks off sucking at his neck to gasp, and then he’s tearing at Patrick’s fly. Patrick’s quivering with how hard he is. It would maybe be embarrassing, except that he can feel Jonny just as hard against him, and he needs their pants off _now._

He doesn’t think he’s ever felt this lost during sex before. He can’t hold onto any thoughts. Just _Jonny,_ everywhere against him, making him burn.

Jonny shoves him back against the bed before their underwear is off, and he follows him down and fastens his mouth onto one of Patrick’s nipples. Patrick slides a hand into Jonny’s hair and keeps him there, and Jonny’s teeth on the sensitive skin send sharp pulses through his groin. It’s amazing, but it’s also torturous, because there’s nothing to thrust against anymore. He needs the hard rub of Jonny’s cock against his again.

“Jonny,” he pleads, and Jonny’s hands drop to the band of his boxers. “Yeah.” And then—

“Oh,” he gasps, because Jonny’s sliding down to his knees and getting Patrick’s cock out.

Patrick struggles up on his arms to watch the flat of Jonny’s tongue come out to lick at the dripping head of his cock, and then the sight gets subsumed in a glowing bright feeling of pleasure that punches the air out of him.

Jonny pulls back an inch or two. “You have no idea how fucking long I’ve wanted to do this,” he growls, and his breath over the head of Patrick’s cock makes his stomach jump.

“Yeah,” Patrick pants, “yeah, I do—oh—” And that’s the end of coherency, because Jonny takes him in his mouth and sucks.

Patrick’s had blowjobs before. But he hasn’t hooked up in a while, and maybe it was never this good, because he’s never felt like he was going to pass out within the first thirty seconds before. The wet furnace of Jonny’s mouth around his cock is good, and then it’s better. Then it’s white-hot, pleasure scraping along all the nerves in Patrick’s body and making him whine.

“Jonny, you gotta stop,” he says, pulling on Jonny’s hair. “I’m gonna—”

Jonny pulls off and back. “Let me fuck you,” he says, and Patrick practically chokes on his own tongue.

“Not gonna—last—” he says, and Jonny breathes, “Oh fuck,” and comes up to kiss him.

He brings his hips down against Patrick’s, and the stroke of their cocks together sends fireworks behind Patrick’s eyelids. He clutches at Jonny, pulling him in closer, harder, getting his fingers into the meat of his ass. Their cocks are slick already—wet with Jonny’s spit, with both of their precome—and Patrick gets a hand around them and makes Jonny groan.

Jonny’s mouth latches onto his again. Patrick feels totally surrounded—nothing but pleasure, nothing but Jonny, and it’s making everything else dissolve. He breaks off the kiss, sucks desperately for air, can feel that he’s losing it. “Jonny—”

“Come on,” Jonny rumbles in his ear, and Patrick arches his back and feels the edge right there. Jonny bites down on his earlobe, and Patrick plunges over, coming so hard he can feel it in the soles of his feet.

“Fuck,” Jonny says, “you’re gorgeous when you do that,” and he kisses Patrick’s panting mouth. Patrick can feel Jonny’s cock sliding through the slick on their stomachs. He wants to help, but he can’t really move. The way Jonny’s mouth falls open and his eyes flutter shut, though, sends little sparky aftershocks through Patrick’s limbs.

“You gonna come for me now?” he asks, hands on Jonny’s sweat-slick back, and Jonny’s hips stutter down as he groans out his orgasm.

“Holy God in heaven,” Jonny says as he collapses into Patrick’s arms, and Patrick slides a hand up between his shoulder blades and another in the small of his back. Holding on.

Jonny’s really too heavy to lie on top of him like that for long, but Patrick doesn’t want to let him go. He noses at the side of Jonny’s face, feels Jonny’s breath hot against his shoulder. “Is it true?” he asks after a while.

“Is what true,” Jonny mumbles into his shoulder, and it sounds so much like sleepy morning Jonny that Patrick feels an overwhelming wave of fondness. He wants to get his teeth in Jonny’s ear, but—

“The thing about—our wrists,” Patrick says, voice faltering embarrassingly on the last words.

Jonny moves, and it makes Patrick’s stomach lurch, but it’s just to slide down against Patrick’s side. It puts their heads far enough apart that Patrick can make eye contact, and Jonny looks back at him seriously. “Don’t you think so?”

“It just—have you ever heard of it?” Patrick asks. “The names of people’s kids on their wrists.”

Jonny’s eyebrow quirks. “Have you ever known anything about us to be normal?”

Patrick has to smile a little at that. And anyway, it’s hard to argue with the evidence. He gropes for Jonny’s wrist and pulls it up next to his own. The three names, identical, with the last four letters of Ariadne fading out on both.

“Dude,” he says. “Then how could you name your kid Ariadne?”

Jonny flushes a little, spots extra color in his cheekbones. Or maybe he was already flushed from what they just did. “I just…got tired of waiting,” he says, and then, “No, shut up,” when Patrick grins again. “It’s—was Ariadne your first?”

“Yeah,” Patrick says.

“Me, too,” Jonny says. “I guess I just got attached to it. To the idea of loving someone with that name. And then when no one with that name came along…”

Patrick gets it. “You made your own,” he says.

Jonny nods, still flushed.

“Did you really think you’d never meet her?” Patrick asks.

Jonny gives him a look, holds his gaze. “I thought I wouldn’t want her when I did,” he says.

It takes a moment for Patrick to realize what he’s saying. Then Patrick has to kiss him: just long enough to sink into it, to revel in the newness of Jonny’s lips against his. Long enough so that he can feel himself smiling when he pulls away.

“I thought maybe I’d get to choose among them, the three of them,” Jonny says. He’s looking down, like maybe he’s embarrassed. “But it didn’t make sense, because—because none of them was you.”

Patrick squeezes his eyes shut and presses his face to the side of Jonny’s neck. “I thought I was broken, for so long.”

“Not broken,” Jonny whispers. He circles his fingers around Patrick’s wrist. “Mine.”

Patrick lets out a gusty breath against his skin. Then, “Excuse you,” he says, but he can’t keep the smile out of his voice. “Pretty sure you’re the one who’s _mine.”_

Jonny pulls back, his competitive face on, but he’s grinning, too, and yeah, this is the person Patrick wants to spend the rest of his life with. “We’ll see about that,” Jonny says, and leans in so they can kiss again.

Patrick rolls onto his side to press their bodies together better, and—hm, his cock isn’t totally disinterested in this. Especially when Jonny’s hand slides down between his asscheeks to trace over his hole.

Patrick hisses at the sensation. “Next time,” he whispers against Jonny’s mouth, and just being able to say that makes him feel warm all over.

Jonny groans into his mouth and kisses him harder.

***

They do leave the bedroom eventually, because Patrick’s not sure how long his sisters will be out at dinner. He’s going to tell them about Jonny, but he doesn’t think walking in on them in bed the right way for his sisters to find out.

It kind of sucks putting their clothes on again, though. Patrick’s gotten pretty attached to Jonny’s bare skin. “Ugh, not the shirt,” he says, when Jonny starts to pull one over his head, and Patrick slips a hand in to tease his nipple

Jonny sucks in a breath, but pulls the shirt down anyway. “Don’t you want to go see your daughter?” he says, mock-stern, and Patrick’s so startled he takes a step back.

He’s not sure what his face is doing, but Jonny looks at him and freezes in the middle of adjusting his collar. “I’m sorry,” Jonny says. “I thought you wanted—”

“No, I do,” Patrick says quickly. “I just—”

He swallows. Anything he says is going to be really embarrassing, but it doesn’t matter, because Jonny is folding him into his arms again, and Patrick can hide his face in Jonny’s neck and not worry about what he looks like.

“Yeah. Let’s go see her,” he says into Jonny’s neck.

***

Patrick leaves a note for his sisters. “I’ll tell them later,” he says to Jonny as they walk out of the apartment. “I kind of just want it to be us for tonight.”

Jonny looks suddenly uncomfortable. “Uh, about that.”

“What?”

“Well.” Jonny ducks his head to fiddle with the elevator buttons, which really aren’t that complicated. “It’s just, I had to leave Ari with someone.”

It takes Patrick a minute. Then he groans. “Not Sharpy.”

“He was the one who told me to come talk to you!” Jonny says. “And it’s not like we have to tell him.”

“Um, it’s Sharpy,” Patrick says. “The man has, like, super senses for anything chirpable.”

“Hey, we showered,” Jonny says, and Patrick gets distracted remembering that. Slippery is a very good look for Jonny, and…

“Yeah. He’s definitely gonna know,” Patrick says

Sharpy isn’t anywhere in sight when they come through the door of the condo. They find him in Ari’s room, covered in spit-up cloths and something suspiciously brown, holding Ari as far away from his body as a four-week-old can be held.

“Your daughter takes after you,” he says to Jonny, standing up and hurrying over to them as soon as they come in. “Hope that was worth it, because it’s absolutely the last time I—”

Then he stops. And stares at them. And starts to grin.

“Fuck,” Patrick says with a sigh.

Jonny looks mutinous. “I have no idea what you—”

“You _did!”_ Sharpy says. “Peeks! And Tazer! I would hug both of you, if I weren’t covered in your baby’s disgusting excretions. Or maybe that means I should hug you more.”

_Your baby._ Patrick can’t help the smile that tugs at his lips, even though Sharpy probably just meant Jonny’s. But Jonny meets his eyes, and Patrick knows he’s thinking the same thing. He feels his smile grow.

“Ew, that’s just gross,” Sharpy says. “Make it stop.”

Jonny breaks eye contact. “We’re not even doing anything.”

“Yeah, tell it to the room you’re going to get,” Sharpy says. “Actually, here, take this baby first. Enough people in this apartment have spit up tonight, and I don’t want to be one of them.”

“Yeah, we love you too, Sharpy,” Patrick says, and takes Ariadne from his arms.

She’s covered in spit-up and maybe fouler things. She’s frowning a little and should probably have been in bed an hour ago. Patrick has never been happier in his life.

Jonny meets his eyes again, and, God, okay. _Now_ Patrick’s never been happier in his life.

“Ew, seriously,” Sharpy says. “I’m going to go home to my new bride, because our love is much less disgusting than this.”

“Jealous,” Patrick calls after him as he leaves, and the thing is, he thinks, as Jonny comes closer and presses his forehead to Patrick’s and his hand to Ari’s cheek, he kind of means it. Because—who wouldn’t be?

***

It’s really not Ari’s best night. It takes another hour or so to clean her up and get her to close her eyes, and by that point Patrick wants to collapse on his feet.

He’ll settle for collapsing against Jonny in Ari’s doorway, though.

He collapses with his back to Jonny’s chest, like this morning, but it’s so much better, because he doesn’t have to move away this time. Jonny tightens his arms around Patrick’s waist and rests his chin on Patrick’s shoulder. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he whispers, because Ari is finally asleep. “About our names.”

It’s such a nice change, to think about his names without a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah?”

“Well, if we’d had each other’s names,” Jonny says, “we would have gotten together sooner. I wouldn’t have slept with that girl back in October, and we wouldn’t have Ari.”

Patrick grins. “Does that mean I finally get the story behind that?”

“It’s really not a very good story,” Jonny says. Patrick pouts for a minute, and Jonny says, “Well, fine, maybe tomorrow.”

Patrick does a mental fist pump. So as not to ruin the moment. “We’ll have to figure out a different way of getting the next two, though,” he says.

“We’ll think of something,” Jonny says.

“I guess we do run pretty fast,” Patrick says. “You distract them, I’ll take the carriage?”

Jonny makes a derisive sound near his ear. “Like you could outrun me,” he says, and Patrick has smiled way too much tonight, but he just can’t stop.

They sway quietly for a minute or two, watching the dark shape in the crib. “Hey,” Patrick says. “Since it’s our kids’ names on our wrists and not each other’s, does that mean I have to love you less than them?”

Jonny gives a quiet little growl and turns Patrick around in his arms to give him the crazy eyes. “You can try,” he says, and pulls Patrick in for a kiss.

Yeah. Patrick’s pretty sure there’s no chance of that at all.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://linskywords.tumblr.com/)!


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